Lawsuits Fail To Lessen Tragedy Of 3 Killed In 1997 School Rampage

August 04, 2000|By William Glaborson, New York Times News Service.

WEST PADUCAH, Ky. — After their lives were changed by a 14-year-old slayer, the parents of the three girls he killed in a school shooting here sued more than 50 people they said shared responsibility for the deaths.

They sued the killer and his parents, teachers, school officials, other teenagers, neighbors and the makers of violent video games, Web sites and movies.

By this week, however, after two judges had dismissed virtually all of the claims, there was just one defendant remaining: the killer himself, Michael Carneal, who is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty but mentally ill to murder.

He is the only one the courts had said could be held liable for the deaths.

Saying they would appeal all of the rulings against them, the families of the three girls Thursday accepted a settlement of their claims against Carneal in which he acknowledged liability for the deaths and set damages at $42 million, an amount the families are never likely to collect.

"It's symbolic," said Gwen Hadley, whose daughter Nichole was one of those killed. "He is finally having to take some responsibility for what he did."

But Carneal has no assets, and his family's insurance company already is fighting claims, saying it is not responsible for criminal acts.

The settlement was a punctuation mark in a long legal battle that already has produced one of the most extensive public records in the country on a school shooting.

The story of the legal battle shows how difficult it is to assign blame to the many people who, in retrospect, might have been able to prevent rampage killings, and it shows how hard it is to unravel what really happened in cases that are, by definition, unfathomable.

In pretrial testimony and in hundreds of documents, the lawyer for the families of the three girls has put together a catalog of the mistakes, the missed warning signs and the provocations that often contribute to rampage killings.

The parents of the three girls say their legal setbacks show that the courts are turning their backs on the schoolhouse tragedies.

"They just want to be like an ostrich and pretend it will all go away," said Sabrina Steger, whose daughter Kayce was killed when Carneal fired into a prayer group at Heath High School on Dec. 1, 1997.

But Carneal is the only one who killed the girls and injured five other students, said Judge William Shadoan of McCracken County Circuit Court, who has been handling one of the cases.

"This kid stole all the guns himself," Shadoan said in an interview. "He took them to school, and he took the gun out of his backpack and started shooting." Whatever else happened, the judge said, no one else did that.

Senior Judge Edward Johnstone of U.S. District Court in Paducah reached a similar conclusion in April when he dismissed a case the families had filed against what they contended was violent media influence.

"Reasonable people," Johnstone wrote, "would not conclude that it was foreseeable to defendants that Michael Carneal, a boy who played their games, watched their movies and viewed their Web site materials, would murder his classmates."

Still, evidence gathered by the parents' lawyer shows that none of the many people who could have taken action to stop Carneal or get him help did so. He was a boy, the court files show, who kept knives under his mattress, flashed guns at school and wrote homicidal and suicidal fantasies in school papers. In his room after the killings, police found instructions on "butchering the human carcass."

Before the crime, the testimony of other teenagers shows, Carneal warned many people that "something big" was going to happen. But, no matter what sinister possibilities others suspected, legal experts say, bedrock principles generally hold people responsible only when they play a role in placing someone in danger.

The plaintiffs' lawyer argued the law is moving toward encouraging people to try to prevent mass tragedies. But, however the cases end, they already have cast unusual light on the evolution of a school shooting.

It was not hard for the plaintiffs' lawyer, Mike Breen, to prove that many of the teenagers at Heath High had been warned. Some of them said they expected water balloons. Some said Michael had told them that Monday would be a "day of reckoning." The court file contains a letter from one girl to another: "I knew Michael was bringing a gun and that he was going to shoot at the prayer circle Monday morning."

The teenagers' lawyers argued they had expected a prank. Shadoan agreed. "There may have been a moral duty or Christian duty to do something," he said in court, "but there was no legal duty."

Perhaps the strongest claims were against a smaller group of teens whom the plaintiffs' lawyer called co-conspirators. None of them was charged with any crime, but the sheriff here said publicly he suspected teenagers had helped plan the shooting and lost their nerve.